D.C. Personal Injury Lawyer & Attorney : Gabriel Assaad : Assaad Law, PLLC: D.C. Injury Law Journal

This week Congress reconvenes in Washington, D.C. and health care reform will be front and center. This a serious concern that medical malpractice reform will be used as a bargaining chip by the Democrats and the Obama Administration in order to get a Health Care Reform bill passed.  

President Obama will be addressing the nation this evening and is expected to set forth what he wants in a health care bill.   We must keep medical malpractice reform out of the Healthcare Bill. Why? Because....

·         Medical malpractice should not be a bargaining chip. Health care reform is about making sure that every American has access to quality, low-cost health care, not about limiting the legal rights of innocent patients harmed by medical negligence.

·         Taking away patient rights does not improve the quality of our health care system or produce cost savings. Forty-eight states have already enacted medical malpractice reform measures. Yet these legal restrictions have done nothing to improve our health care system, reduce costs, or help people harmed by medical negligence.

·         Medical malpractice is about real people with real injuries. The Institute of Medicine estimates that 98,000 people die each year in the US from preventable medical errors (the 6th leading cause of death in America).

·         Defensive medicine is a myth. Both the GAO and CBO question the prevalence of defensive medicine, and have detailed how tampering with the legal system will save practically no money. Some so-called defensive medicine may be motivated more by profit and less by liability concerns.

One thing is clear - we must ALL be a part of the fight to keep medical malpractice reform out of the health care bill. 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

The CDC finds that the failure to follow proper infection control procedures has put over 60,000 people at risk in the past decade for Hepatitis. 

Hepatitis B and Care efficiently transmitted through contact with blood and other body fluids and tissues, which potentially puts healthcare providers and patients at risk of infection during medical procedures. However, such transmission can be prevented if the standard of care is followed by healthcare personnel with respect to infection control.  In an article published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on January 6, 2009, it stated that the procedure to protect people from this terrible virus are not employed.

....but all too often these are not employed, according to a review article by Nicola Thompson and colleagues in the January 6, 2009 Annals of Internal Medicine.

According to the article, in the past decade 33 outbreaks in U.S. non-hospital healthcare settings have resulted in 450 people acquiring HBV and/or HCV infection. In all these cases, transmission was presumably from patient to patient, caused by "failure of healthcare personnel to adhere to fundamental principles of infection control and aseptic technique.

See the media announcement by the CDC regarding this epidemic and failure of the health industry.  If you have contracted Hepatitis and believe that it was caused by a visit to a doctor or dentist or any other healthcare provider, you should contact an attorney.


 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link